Matt McAvoy Book Review

James is a decent writer, and this investigative suspense thriller is pretty readable, if formulaic stuff – as long as you’re not triggered by its subject matter of child sexual abuse. As is a common trope in fiction, the perpetrator is a Catholic priest (they do get a bad rap, it has to be said) and the killer a former victim of his. It’s an entertaining book, though it is fair to say it doesn’t really progress beyond this premise – and that is quite a long word count for what is essentially a story arc with a very small handful of bullet points progressing it. By the closing chapters, the backstory is still unfolding in flashback, but unnecessarily so, I would say, because we already know what it is. At the risk of sounding critical, don’t expect any surprises. That said, it is a standard buddy-cop tale, with some genuinely likeable characters (even the killer evokes sympathy and endearment), which I’m sure will spawn sequels.

I’m not certain, but I believe Catechisms may be a follow-up to a previous book by the author; indeed, there are references to a character in the blurb of that which look familiar. In this case, I think I would have liked to read that first; the lead character in this entry (a cop named Paige) is clearly haunted by events we aren’t privy to – and perhaps disappointingly, we never get to be, which did make me ask the question of why it was included at all.

But I don’t want to sound critical about a book I generally quite enjoyed, and found a reasonable way to pass the time. It was too long for the substance and the progression, admittedly, but it didn’t ever really feel like it dragged; this is one I would consider a simple Minnesota crime tale about tragic characters, bad mistakes, regrets and retribution, which the Midwest does so well it is almost its own genre. It isn’t an actioner, but a thoughtful book, and one you can easily immerse yourself in without too much effort. It is, for the most part, quite well written, though there are a couple of grammatical styles used which always grate on me, such as the use of past tense/third party internal dialogue when supposedly thinking in real time. I would say then that it isn’t entirely the finished article, but it isn’t necessarily far off it. I’m sure that James has written books and stories which improve on this one, and at the same time there are many entries in the genre which pale against it, so I would say it, and its author, are both worth a look, and I wish him well.